Benjamin, the last captive marsupial wolf, or thylacine, died on September 7, 1936, at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania. The video below supposedly depicts the erroneously named Benjamin prior to her demise, attributed to neglect by zoo staff. (The name Benjamin derives from a newspaper article on the marsupial from 1968; it is unclear whether she actually had a name.)

The species, Thylacinus cynocephalus, was not listed as protected in the wild until the year of Benjamin’s death. However, no reliable sightings have been made since then and the thylacine was declared officially extinct in 1986. Apocryphal accounts of thylacine encounters have, however, continued to trickle in, most recently in 2005 when a German tourist snapped several pictures (now unavailable online, ostensibly due to copyright issues).

The species is a favorite target of cryptozoologists—scientists who study and search for animals thought to be extinct—and the amateur enthusiasts who record their progress breathlessly in blogs tinged with the sort of fanaticism one might find on a site devoted to Elvis sightings.

Unlike the case for the continued reign of the King, though, the idea of a relict population of thylacines has a whiff of plausibility (if not probability) to it, at least to this casual observer. Though the creature was only sighted in Tasmania following European occupation of Oceania, Aboriginal petroglyphs and fossil remains indicate that thylacines once lived on the Australian mainland. (They are thought to have become extinct there around 2,000 years ago.) It seems conceivable that a dog-sized mammal might escape notice in the hinterlands of the Australian outback.

Sadly, it is probably more likely that the campaign waged against the creature beginning in the 1830s did in fact put an end to it. The Van Diemens Land Company offered rewards for dead thylacines in the name of protecting sheep; recent analysis has shown, though, that while the creature had massive jaws capable of opening over 90 degrees, its bite force was only capable of dispatching smaller prey such as wallabies. The more likely perpetrators of sheep killings were feral dogs…brought by the settlers themselves. These same dogs probably hastened the demise of the thylacine by competing for the same resources as well.

A slender fox-faced animal that hunted at night for wallabies and birds, the thylacine was 100 to 130 cm (39 to 51 inches) long, including its 50- to 65-cm (20- to 26-inch) tail. Weight ranged from 15 to 30 kg (33 to 66 pounds), but about 25 kg was average. The fur was yellowish brown, with 13 to 19 dark bars on the back and rump. The hind legs were longer than the forelegs, and the tail was very thick at the base, tapering evenly to a point. The skull was remarkably similar to that of a dog but had characteristics diagnostic of a marsupial. Other differences include a smaller braincase and jaws with an enormous, almost 90-degree gape. In a shallow pouch that opened rearward, the female carried two to four young at a time.

Though exonerated as a sheep-killer, the thylacine was, like the wolf (Canis lupus), its equivalent in Europe and North America, a fearsome apex predator. The two species, only very distantly related—remember, the thylacine, like kangaroos and koalas, was a marsupial—represent a fascinating case of convergent evolution. Isolated on the Australian continent for milennia, a line of marsupial predators evolved to fill the same niche that canids did outside of Australia. A side-by-side comparison of the skulls of the two species shows remarkable similarities.

It is pleasing, if fantastical, to think that the thylacine might have evolved some of the same cleverness for which the wolf is legendary, and been able to evade human detection in the wilds of Australia.